Whisky Business

The Whisky Ladies of Mumbai on a good dram, the bra-o-meter and memories.

When the Whisky Ladies of Mumbai meet for a tasting, the whiskies are judged on a very specific criterion. “We have started to talk about the bra-ometer,” says Carissa Hickling, the co-founder and manager of the group.

The group was founded in August 2015 and at one of their tastings, an American diplomat drinking a particular French whisky casually exclaimed, ‘how did you go from being a perfect gentleman to getting my bra off like that?’, recalls Hickling, while laughing uproariously. “And that has been a benchmark for the whiskies. To what extent does the bra come off?”

Hickling, a financial services consultant from Canada, first came to India in 1990 and has been living here since 2003. Originally a wine drinker, she switched to hard liquor because of the poor quality of wine available in the country back then, but quickly had her fill of rum-paanis. Enter single malts. “I would meet friends that were interested in single malts, and you could have a different kind of conversation over a quality single malt and over time a curiosity grew.”

In October 2014, Hickling started a blog called Whisky Lady to share her experiences with others. The expertise she developed along the way led Pooja Vir, a 40-year-old publisher of children’s magazine, who was helping a friend do research for a book on whisky, get in touch with Hickling. Vir, who was part of a women’s only whisky group in London, suggested she and Hickling start something similar in Mumbai. As it turns out, “it was not difficult coming up with the list [of women],” Hickling says with a laugh.

The group, the core of which ranges from eight to 13 members, meets once a month and a tasting session will last two or three hours. Usually, there are three different whiskies on the menu. Some tastings have a planned theme; others are what Hickling calls “contributor’s choice”, where it is dependent on who brings what whisky. The venue rotates from house to house.

“We have an absolutely brilliant time,” Hickling says. “The two things we have in common within the group are that we are interested in exploring whisky and we all have had unconventional paths in life. And what that means is you bring a lot of intelligence, humour and range of perspectives, so we have really interesting conversations”

A tasting starts with the aroma of the whisky. “Ninety percent is your sense of smell,” Hickling says. “If you plug your nose when you taste a whisky, suddenly it goes from a kaleidoscope of colours to black and white.” How you then process the taste on your palette, and the finish, comes down to one’s own personal experience.

For Vir, talking about whisky doesn’t mean discussing the grain or the cask. “I talk, as do most of the ladies, about how the whiskey makes us feel, or whether we like it, or not,” she says. There was one particular whisky she first tasted a few years ago that made her feel “like I was one of the teachers in Harry Potter and I was having a closed-door meeting to discuss Harry Potter’s fate.” When she drank it again last week, that memory came rushing back to her. “Just like food inspires memories and feelings, it is the same with whisky,” she says.

Vir credits Hickling with doing all the hard work necessary to sustain the group. Hickling maintains an Excel sheet that keeps track of the various whiskies they have tried, who owns what whisky and what they think of the whiskies they have tasted. “I can’t think of any other woman who can write or speak or who loves whisky as passionately as Carissa does,” Vir says.

A whisky tasting is different from drinking socially, or even drinking in a social setting. “In a whisky tasting environment, you are dissecting, distilling and discussing,” Hickling says. One of the joys of doing that is the different ways in which people will respond to the same drink. “What I love about doing whisky tastings in India is that someone will go, ‘oh, it’s got kokum, or there’s imli, or there’s amla. Or that kind of desiccated coconut ‘,” Hickling says. “So you’ll have these references of spices and flavours that mean nothing to someone outside India. It is a cultural exchange.”

For Shruti Sutwala, a 37-year-old marketing consultant and one of the core members, the benefit of being part of the group is clear. “I never knew those many whiskies have existed,” she says. “We have gone all over the world. The experimental nature of the tasting really stands out for me. As an individual, I would not have been able to reach all those whiskies.”

Hickling, who is part of two other whisky groups, admits that women are more open to trying different kinds of whiskies than men tend to be and that the all-female composition creates a different dynamic. “I can hold my own in a man’s world, but it is so much fun being in a woman’s environment. Let’s just say, the hair comes down,” she says.